Author: Robjn Cantus

Trafalgar Square

Ceri Richards painted Trafalgar Square in 1951 for the Festival of Britain exhibition 60 Paintings In ‘51. Over the next few years he would continue making prints and paintings with a series of abstractions. 

He taught at various London art colleges and after 1951, when a large painting of Trafalgar Square (now in the Tate Gallery) was shown at the Festival of Britain, his reputation was international. †

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, London, 1950

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, 1951

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square II, 1951

After working on a series of these paintings and various drawings Richards issued the lithograph below in 1952. In another five years he would make another lithograph in 1957 and another in 1958. It was a theme that you would assume would be a year or two, but latest over a decade.  

 Ceri Richards – Sunlight in Trafalgar Square, 1952

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square (Movement of Pigeons), 1952

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, 1957

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, 1958

 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, 1962

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 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square (trial proof), 1962

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 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, 1961–2

† Ralph Alan Griffiths – The City of Swansea: Challenges and Change, 1991

The Pink House

This is a short little post but a fun on about a book that was published.

Olive Cook and Edwin Smith, to those who didn’t know, were husband and wife. Edwin is famous for his photography books and Olive penned a lot of the text. They had moved to The Coach House, Windmill Hill, Saffron Walden in 1966. Originally completed in 1865, it was part of the Vineyards Estate, a large victorian house built for William Murray Tuke, the tea merchant, and designed by William Beck, a local architect in Saffron Walden who specialised in Gothic Revival.

When Olive died the old coach house was being sorted for an auction to take place outside the property with various clusters of her possessions arranged into lots inside. The papers were sorted by friends, one of whom was Philippa Pearce, author of Tom’s Midnight Garden. She found a typed up manuscript and Dennis Hall of the Inky Parrot Press assumed it was a short story Olive Cook had been due to send him.

This manuscript was typeset and printed with illustrations commissioned by John Vernon Lord.

When copies were distributed at Olive Cook’s memorial service it was recognised by Mark Haworth-Booth as a story written by his daughter, Emily Haworth-Booth, who had sent it to Olive Cook for comment.

So though the book circulates still as Olive Cook, Emily Haworth-Booth’s story was published before the Inky Parrot Press, 2002 copy; in Varsity Cherwell May Anthologies: 2001: Short Stories, 2001.

‘Olive Cook’ – The Pink House, 2002, Inky Parrot Press

Video: Kenneth Rowntree – The War Years

Kenneth Rowntree – The War Years

John Piper at Windsor Castle

John Piper at Windsor Castle

Lucie Rie & Hans Coper – Making Buttons

Lucie Rie & Hans Coper – Making Buttons

Paul Nash at Avebury

In July 1933 the Nash went on holiday to Marlborough with his friend Ruth Clark. From there they made a day trip to nearby Avebury. This is a video of his photographs, drawings and paintings he made inspired by the Stones.

Life after death

The death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 aged 36 was a shock to the world. It affected artists who would end up giving her life after she was dead through her image. Fun fact, my sister married into the Mortenson family. 

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 The front page of the New York Daily Mirror published on August 6, 1962

Warhol was the first to make a print in tribute of her, below is the original publicity photograph for Niagara by Frank Powolny. It has the black pen lines where Warhol cropped the photograph and his in studio photographers ‘blew it up’.

 Frank Powolny – Publicity still for the 1953 film Niagara, cropped by Warhol. 

The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It all sounds so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face. †

 Andy Warhol – Marilyn Diptych, 1962

Richard Hamilton made a print a few years later using a mocked up contact sheet with images crossed out from a series of photographs taken by George Barris in the Summer of 1962. 

 Richard Hamilton – My Marilyn, 1965

 Robert Rauschenberg – Test Stone #1 (Marilyn Monroe), 1967 

 Michael Rothenstein – She’s American – Cartier Bresson on Marilyn Monroe, 1977

Rothenstein would use Monroe’s image for his prints as well, it was a time when he was using famous starlets like Julie Christie. He juxtaposes them with planks of burnished wood and raw textures. The photographs are screen printed over the woodcut. 

 Michael Rothenstein – Marilyn I, 1978

 James Rosenquist – Marilyn Monroe, 1962

† Andy Warhol – Popism, 1980

The Day Marilyn Died

This post came about when I was writing about how artists reacted to the death of Marilyn Monroe and I wondered what the newspapers looked like on that day, well these are the front pages I found for 6th August, 1962, the day Monroe died.

I would guess these last four papers belong to the same company due to the same image of Monroe used, I find it interesting the amount of front page she got, the cropping of the picture. The news commanding the most coverage in Los Angeles, home of Hollywood. 

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I would guess these last four papers belong to the same company due to the same image of Monroe used, I find it interesting the amount of front page she got, the cropping of the picture. The news commanding the most coverage in Los Angeles, home of Hollywood. 

Eric Ravilious – Designs for London Transport’s Green Line

Eric Ravilious – Designs for London Transport’s Green Line

Buttons

Although Rie had been a successful potter in Austria in the 1930s, when she arrived in London in 1938 she had to start afresh and make a living in the face of wartime austerity. Ceramic buttons provided the answer. Working with assistants such as German émigré Hans Coper she first fulfilled orders for ceramic buttons from fellow Austrian Fritz Lampl and his company Bimini. At the height of her so called `Button Factory’ Rie was producing 6000 buttons a month. But by 1955 her pottery production had mainly switched to table wares and later to the now renowned bowls, bottles and vases. The exhibition contains a comprehensive selection of these, as well as hundreds of buttons. †

Lucie Gomperz was born into a Viennese family, the daughter of a doctor who worked with Sigmund Freud, she enjoyed an affluent childhood. She had studied pottery at the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1922. By 1925 she had set up a small pottery of her own and was exhibiting works and becoming respected. She had married Hans Rie in 1926, but they parted in 1940.

In 1938, being Jewish, she fled from Nazi Austria to Britain. In London for a short time, she provided accommodation for Erwin Schrödinger (Schrödinger’s Cat).

To makes ends meet in Wartime Britain, Rie had set up a pottery in London but she was yet to produce her iconic thin vases in London, at this point she was surviving by designing and making buttons. In 1946, Lucie Rie gave Hans Coper a job during these years of austerity.

Interest in Rie’s buttons was rekindled in 1984 when Issey Miyake met Rie. She gave him a large collection of her unused buttons which he used as the basis of 1989 Autumn/Winter Collection. Another avid collector of Rie’s buttons was couturier and collector Anthony Shaw. Two outfits designed by Shaw for gallerist Anita Besson in 1992 and adorned with Rie’s buttons have recently been added to the exhibition. †

Coper had almost no experience in pottery at all. Born in Chemnitz, his father was Jewish, and had killed himself in 1936 to try to shelter the family from the Nazi’s attention as his mother wasn’t Jewish.

Still Coper left Germany in 1939 for Britain. Here, along with most Germans in Britain, he was arrested. Then deported to Canada. In 1941 he was able to return to Britain as a conscientious objector, serving in the non-combatant corps, doing work that was not aggressive, or not directly aiding destruction.

In the post-war years he went to Lucie Rie’s studio at 18 Albion Mews, he made buttons with her and helped her with the firing. He learnt how to pot from Heber Mathews and then returned to Rie’s studio to work for her making domestic wear like cups and plates.

† The Decorative Arts Society